


Like Surrendering

by spoke



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Genre: Gen, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 20:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My original assignment!  Thanks to my beta Jenn, and to yulechat for keeping me going. <3 all of you!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Like Surrendering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wilde_Shade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wilde_Shade/gifts).



> My original assignment! Thanks to my beta Jenn, and to yulechat for keeping me going. &lt;3 all of you!

My Dear Dorian,

I am writing now from Paris, and very sorry to have missed you. What I have seen of this charming city thus far makes me certain it would suit you wonderfully. You have been so much in love with beauty, and I have found it everywhere here. To walk along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées has been a wonder and a refreshing change from our foggy, dreary London.

But on the subject of beauty. I happened to be dining with, among others, Lord Stavely the other evening. Your name came into the conversation quite by coincidence, and I'm afraid he said some rather dreadful things, Dorian. I pray that they are not true, for I have long regarded you as the finest of my friends; even as the finest person it has been my privilege to know. Please write to me of this, or if you do not care to write, come and visit. You never travel abroad any more, Dorian, and you used to enjoy it.

I am to be in Paris for at least six months, working on my latest idea for a painting. Do give me some word of you, Dorian.

Ever your friend,  
Basil Hallward.

 

Putting his pen away, Basil leaned back with a heavy sigh. Even in such simple terms as he had used, it had been hard to write. For a moment as he watched the ink dry, he wished he was back in the studio on the day of his last sitting with Dorian. For all it sordid and shaken ending, anything had seemed possible on that day, the very air charged with artistic possibility. How had that changed, and when? Surely not the day of the last sitting - surely it had taken some time for Harry's influence to take root. Yet at least by the time of poor Miss Vane's death, it had been obvious that something had changed in Dorian. The intensity of his infatuation and the equally intense reversal of his emotions had both been frightening to behold.

Year after year as time went on he seemed a man possessed; on the surface the same bright and innocent youth as he had always been; yet the rumours that Basil now had to fight to think of as such making it clear that something darker moved beneath the surface and out of the sight of decent society. It had been so easy in London to dismiss such things; everything was so dreary, especially in such fogs as the one which covered the city on the night of his departure, that it was impossible to permit himself to think badly of the young man who had been so much the brightest point of his life.

In the clearer and brighter life of Paris, it seemed equally impossible to doubt such people as the Duke of Berwick. He knew as much of these men as he knew of himself; of Dorian he was ignorant in equal proportion. Those friends and acquaintances who spoke badly of him had also always the time to meet with him, or any of his friends; Dorian he needs must hunt down for any hope of a meeting. It was beginning to feel as though he had escaped some unhealthy influence on his thinking that had nothing to do with the fogs back home.

He was jolted out of his revere by a knock at the door, and shivered a bit as he saw the time. After he'd let the servant in with his breakfast tray, he sat down to consider. It was clear that if he remained in his suite today, he would do nothing but brood over Dorian. The very room seemed to have taken on an atmosphere of self-reproach, dulling the colours and shrinking the space that had seemed so open and airy when he arrived. If he was to get any work done on the painting, it would have to be by way of taking his pencils out and finding a decent park to sketch in.

Accordingly, when the servant came to retrieve his tray, he asked for directions to a suitable place. A number of suggestions were discarded before he came to one that sounded a decent prospect, and thanked the man for his advice.

~~~

The change of setting proved immediately soothing to his nerves. On all sides he was surrounded by that beauty he had sought, unattached to any memories of his own and thus untainted by them. For a number of hours, he sat in the relative quiet of the garden, breathing in the scents of flowers for which he did not know the names; and quite content to leave it so, focused instead upon the passersby and their strangely English fashions.

Then slowly, with the fits and starts that affect a man who has not focused properly upon his art in ages, he began to sketch. Roughly they took shape upon the page, she with her shy and ethereal beauty, he with his radiant youth yet intact; and yet even in the simple lines, it became she who was truly radiant, while he became touched with something sinister. As the time went on, she gathered the ghosts of angels around her, while he drew forth from the back of the artist's mind some terrible creature never fully seen, but whose presence could be recognized in the twisting coils of some creature whose tentacles very nearly framed him, as if waiting to drag him down into the roiling sea below.

Basil found that he hardly noticed any longer the stares of those strolling by or the quality of the light, his whole being caught up and transformed, much as it had been years ago. Here were the lines that presaged such a simple tribute to divine light as mortal hands could manage, there the coils of smoke that mimicked the coils of Dorian's creature.

Vaguely, he thought that it need not be them; that it should not be them, in fact, for he had forgotten in the intervening years what he had said to Henry about the vanity and folly of showing one's self in one's art; but the thought remained in the back of his mind, as the front pursued this new clarity of vision.

As he finally tired and noticed the late-afternoon quality of the light, however, the thought took on more prominence. It was quite right, after all; it was even fitting, that he should be put back upon his proper course in this fashion. It couldn't be too difficult to find sitters whose looks could erase those unfortunate resemblances; after all, this was a city of painters, with even the Americans coming to it in droves.

~~~

When he got back to his rooms that evening, the presence of the letters still lying out unfinished startled him quite as badly as if he'd found some loathsome insect crawling about on the desk. He stared at the words in something of a trance, wondering at them; they were clearly in his own hand and yet he felt rather detached from them, especially of the pleading tone.

Might it not be better to delay writing to Dorian? At least until he could manage a more controlled tone for the correspondence. He had left his forwarding address, at any rate, so if anyone wanted to contact him he was hardly out of reach.

Crossing the intervening space without quite noticing he'd done so, Basil took the letter up, folded it sharply, and locked it away. Another evening perhaps; it would certainly be best to wait until his head was clearer, and reserve the morning light for his painting.


End file.
